A modern classic about the bitter rivalry between Mary, Queen of Scots, and her cousin and fellow ruler, Elizabeth I of England - retold by Scotland's most popular playwright. Mary and Elizabeth are two women with much in common, but more that sets them apart. Following the death of her husband, the Dauphin of France, the beautiful, and staunchly Catholic Mary Stuart has returned from France to rule Scotland, a country she neither knows nor understands. Ill-prepared to rule in her own right, Mary has failed to learn what her protestant cousin, Elizabeth Tudor, knows only too well - that a queen must rule with her head, not her heart. All too soon the stage is set for a deadly endgame in which there can only be one winner and one queen on the one green island.

This was a huge success at the 1987 Edinburgh Festival, subsequently performed elsewhere in Britain and in Europe. Written in Lallan Scots, it is a most exciting piece of poetic drama.

Margery Palmer McCulloch's SCOTNOTE study guide provides a background to the history and to the dramatic presentation, as well as giving an overview of the modern context of Lochhead's play, for senior school pupils and students at all levels.

During her career Liz Lochhead has been described variously as a poet, feminist playwright, translator and broadcaster but has said that 'when somebody asks me what I do I usually say writer. The most precious thing to me is to be a poet. If I were a playwright, I'd like to be a poet in the theatre.' Liz Lochhead has a large and devoted audience and delights audiences where she goes.

A study of the Scottish female writer and dramatist Liz Lochhead. It examines the full range of her work and supplies a variety of contexts in which her work can be read, including feminist ideology and theatre history. It also contains a full bibliography of her work and new material.

From the author of Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off.

Thebans tells the ancient stories of the Kingdom of Thebes. It focuses on Oedipus the King, abandoned as a baby and who later inadvertently kills his father and marries his mother, and Antigone, who dies rather than obey Oedipus' successor and leave her brother's corpse unburied...

Adapted from Molière's "School for Wives" by Lochhead, 'Scotland's greatest living dramatist' (Scotland on Sunday)

Tuesday, 19 August, 1561, 9 a.m. Through the fog a ship arrives in Leith docks, and Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, steps ashore. She is eighteen and on her young shoulders rest the hopes of the Catholic establishment of Europe.